Return to Goulburn

For a regional town that has experienced the Biblical seven years of drought,Goulburn was blustery shiny on this Sunday morning. More shops were open for business when they were not a few years back. There were the under thirties and a spattering of teenagers walking out and about which is vital to the demographics of any urban concentration. Businesses like Harvey Norman had taken a vote of confidence in Goulburn by occupying that vital corner store location along the main road - when others like Harris Scarfe were before. There was even a spanking new Asian food outlet.

The icon of Goulburn - the Big Merino - had been moved to nearer the Hume highway to Canberra. The other icon of the town - Bryants Pieshop - has steadfastly maintained its two outlets, one in its original shop and a branch at the shopping centre only a block away. The pie varieties remain the same good consistency and in taste. An outlet selling casual wear to Gen Y had a hive of activity near Sunday lunchtime. The RSL club stands right in the town centre and had custom no different from any other suburb of Sydney at this hour on a weekend day.

Are retail outlets opening longer hours on weekends as a result of under sales achievement during the week? Maureen at Allens chats to me and informs me that she has to work when the store reopens after Christmas on Boxing Day itself. She is slightly surprised that I have come all the way from coastal Wollongong with my mates to shop in this inland town about a good 90 minutes drive away. Maureen knows the Wollongong area well - she has a brother residing in Figtree, a suburb south of the university and city. I find a long desired lemon and orange skin zester and Maureen sells it to me at half price.

Houses are offered for sale at a third of Sydney prices. Food prices are the same as in the Big Smoke. There is even a branch of the bookshop chain Berkelouw, for which the only other outlet I am aware of in NSW is in Darlinghurst in Sydney's eastern suburbs. Maybe it is the Christmas shopping season that has contributed to higher than imagined retail activity to me in Goulburn that morning.

By the early afternoon, I am back in Wollongong, washing my car and wondering why the ladies at that particular Shell station along the Hume highway are never friendly. I make an affirmation to stop by the apple orchard and Eling Forest Winery at Suttons Forest the next time I am back on the highway leading to Goulburn. Ever since I spent two weeks based in this town on business several years ago and I have been hooked ever since to make occasional visits. Is it the lure of empty wide misty streets on a cold winter's morning that adds to the fascination I have? In summer it can be extremely hot and dry. I don't really know why, but Goulburn has a irrefutable and inexplicable place in my heart.

Food, Politics and Change

I was in the electorate of Bennelong, Sydney when the news came through - a Federal Government which had been in power for around 138 months had been voted out in a sheer process of democracy. Over the delicious Indian rojak salad that cousin Susan and her hubby Boo Ann had prepared, the people in this gathering contemplated the experience of change. A sitting Prime Minister, who perhaps had stayed on for too long, was almost on the verge of being replaced by a fresh newcomer in Bennelong. Political history was being made over the night.

The evening before, in another suburb, I had tried Swiss pizza for the first time, with thinner crusts and more meat. I was not convinced that my group of colleagues were not eating Italian pizza, for how can one separate the two definitions? It was a warm night outside, but we were sitting in air-conditioned comfort. I watched, with intense interest, the goings-on of an open kitchen preparing the food, with the woodfire oven in full view and a fatigued teenager continuing to turn the dough. How can this place be called Swiss Quattro, I thought. The food perhaps reflected the Australian society of today, a fusion of values and cultures. After downing the bruschetta, Ceasers Salad, pasta and pizza, we could dip pre-cut strawberries and marsh mellows with chocolate sauce as if we were having fondue on the mountain slopes near Lucerne.

Recovering on Sunday in Wollongong town with a lunch enjoyed with an ex-colleague, I realised that the flavour of the weekend had been change. It was about actual and contemplation of change. Politics - or basically how those in power run a place -may not be related to the partaking of food, but is perhaps best digested together, for achieving that balance of nourishment for both the mind and the stomach. Three individuals I know, and whom I had met up that past week, were making changes in their lives, one even going inter-state. Do my friends already want to make that change long ago, or were they encouraged in a kind of evolving process? Do people remain in their comfort zone and require to be pushed to change? Or do people refuse to change and push out others who seem be a threat to their presumed existence?

And to celebrate those changes, we had met, over food.

At Home

I love chicken curry, South Indian style – smooth aromatic gravy over juicy meats marinated in the flavours of several spices, chillies and seductive coconut milk. A sister of a Portuguese mate living in Wollongong remarked that she could not understand why I put potatoes in the curry mix and then serve them with rice – a double whammy of carbohydrates that bewildered her logic.

The curry I learnt to cook comes from Mum, who experienced a forerunner of current Australian multiculturalism by sharing and exchanging recipes with her cosmopolitan neighbours in the tropical heat of Malaysian afternoons. It took me perhaps a quiet weekend in summery New South Wales to realize why she and I – plus the multitude of others stirring up Tamil-styled chicken curry in the former Malayan peninsular – had put both potatoes and rice in the same meal.

The British had ruled Malaya in colonial days, and it dawned on me that they had been raised on potatoes and bread. Savoury, well-textured potatoes must have been hard to come by, more difficult than the flour and yeast to make bread. So whilst their house keepers in the humidity of their outpost dished up what they knew best – their childhood curries – the masters also yearned for their own comforts of childhoods past.

Sydney, and most of New South Wales, continue to perpetuate in the nether zone of no or little rain, despite cloudy overcast days and some unusual of rain. It has been several years that water use restrictions have been imposed, and now it has grown worse to restricting hand-hosing gardens on two days of the week, before 10am and after 4pm. The idea is not to think so much of watering lawns as to find more sources of water for household use. In my corner of Australia, tucked between rising hills and miles of beaches, many families have installed rain water tanks so that they escape the legislated water use restrictions. The question is whether the skies do allow sufficient water to pour down to be collected in such tanks, but I admire the spirit of my regional neighbours.

So my garden in Balgownie has to be in tune with these water-conscious times. Maybe not. My front patch, outside the bay windows, is an attempt of a microcosm of Australian flora from Darwin to Hobart. There is frangipani, more at home facing the Arafura Sea; jade-like leaves of native succulents that thrive on benign neglect and little rain; cane palms; green and gold coloured coastal bushes; and pink flowering geraniums. In contrast at the back of the house, where bedroom windows face, are aromatic plants covering a spectrum of mint, basil, chillies, chiam hong, curry leaf, strawberry and parsley. The garden bed facing the lawn and lounge houses what I think are really useful growth – aloe vera; deep yellow and iceberg red roses; kumquats, Tahitian limes and Imperial mandarins in a citrus-related collection; chrysanthemums; ornamental red and yellow small chillies; daun gaduh; and some red and pink boundary blooms of a plant that seems to flower the year round. There is another patch with work-in-progress but now viewed with a flowering theme in mind – hibiscus, bougainvilleas, geraniums and some native wildflowers.